Classic VW Beetle found hiding perfectly preserved 1970s photos – can you solve the mystery of who’s in them? 

Have you ever shoved something in the glove box – as one does – you know, the sort of important-but-I’ll-deal-with-you-later kind of stuff? Now imagine doing that with your freshly shot roll of film, completely forgetting about it, and then selling your car with it still inside.

That’s the mystery behind a collection of family photographs discovered in the glovebox of a cute yellow 1953 VW Beetle. Retired mechanic Dave Pragnell bought the car in 1975 and found a handful of colour-film negatives tucked away in it, but didn’t think they were salvageable. Eventually, a decade later, he developed them out of curiosity, and that’s how they ended up with the beetle’s current owner, Julian Robinson. He found out that they were likely shot somewhere between 1968 and 1975, so they’re 50-something years old.

The unlikely time capsule revealed glimpses of the car’s previous owners, including a young man lounging across the Beetle’s bonnet, a woman sitting in the passenger seat and the Beetle and another car parked outside a house.

The photographs have already attracted around 200,000 views on Robinson’s social media, and the subsequent BBC coverage featuring the images brought his search into the spotlight too. One particularly useful clue has emerged: the for-sale sign in the background was identified as Hawthorn Close in Takeley.

Robinson now hopes to track down the people pictured, reunite them with their long-lost photographs and get the Beetle back on the road. There’s even a plan to return to the original location and recreate one of the photographs, more than half a century after it was first taken.

I hope he will succeed, but I think there’s another key takeaway here for film photographers. Develop your negs, folks!

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